How are dictionaries shaped by social history, and how far do dictionaries themselves shape social history? Wordlists and dictionaries (broadly defined) reflect particular perspectives and may be adapted for new audiences. This chapter maps the most significant historical intersections of English dictionaries and Anglophone societies. It spans the shift from English as a colonized to a colonizing language, from the medieval period to around 1900. Its building blocks include intersecting conceptions of gender roles, the family, social status, work and industrialization, as well as urbanization and racialization. Some other concepts remain implicit. Education (inside as well as outside the home) interconnects every section. It was in religious contexts that Latin was codified and methods were perfected for organizing words within books as well as books within libraries. The idea of the nation was later shaped by the Oxford English Dictionary with history and by the state with nineteenth-century mass primary education. Overall, tensions between human agency and determinism are brought constantly into the foreground. The focus on English lets me contrast revisions of the ‘same’ text within the limits of a handbook chapter. My anecdotal approach relates social changes to identifiable revisions and initiatives by individual lexicographers.

Early modern Europe was predominantly rural and agriculture was the most common form of production. Yet women’s contribution to agricultural work is relatively neglected in studies of women’s work and remains an area of discussion and disagreement among historians. This chapter sets out to tackle misconceptions around women’s agricultural work. It does so first by critically examining the main areas for debate; secondly by offering a survey of women’s work in different parts of Europe; and finally through two detailed case studies (of Norway and south-west England). The case studies not only highlight women’s contribution to agricultural work in detail but also suggest a range of research approaches to uncovering women’s work. We find that women’s work in agriculture was often substantial and was varied and adaptable. For instance, in coastal Norway and some mountainous regions women did the majority of agricultural work because men were absent working elsewhere; in eastern Europe women’s labour was as important as men’s; in south-west England women contributed about a third of labour required in agriculture; while in some economies, such as central Spain in the eighteenth-century, women were largely absent from agricultural work because they could earn more from rural textile production.

Nine servants were murdered on the night of October 23, 1789: five men and four women. In contrast to Dongo, his uncle, and the killers, every detail of the biographies of these working people has disappeared. This chapter attempts to restore their place in history by imagining what three of these humble employees did on the day of the crime, a recreation of the typical experiences of plebeian daily life in late eighteenth-century Mexico City.

The first section (‘Centralisation’) traces the consolidation of authority in the hands of the benchers, whose internal supremacy appears to have been of fairly recent origin, and the growing interest of Elizabethan governments in the societies, with the effect of strengthening the benchers’ powers. Before the great expansion of membership, most of the routine administrative chores necessary to keep the societies operating on a day-to-day basis were undertaken by members themselves. But thereafter there was increasing reliance on salaried officers or servants (‘Bureaucratisation’), especially the creation of full-time administrative positions to assist the nominal temporary head of each society, the treasurer. On-going provision of catering and lodging depended on a continuously expanding domestic establishment. However the inns had both a ‘Servant Problem’, and a ‘Management Problem’. Servants depended for much of their income on tips and perquisites, leading to various conflicts of interest, while much of the responsibility for overseeing the societies’ affairs was shouldered by a small minority of benchers. The chapter concludes with a glance at difficulties experienced in managing the societies’ finances, which encouraged the commutation of former academic requirements into cash payments.

Leo Tolstoy wrote throughout his career about Russian peasants, first at a class-inflected distance but later with admiration for their clothing, labor, and religious and moral feelings. As a Count, he automatically held a particular position vis-à-vis peasants, especially before the 1861 emancipation. His literary works and teaching tales depict peasants variously, sometimes idealizing an individual (from Platon Karataev in War and Peace to Alyosha the Pot), other times looking with distrust or frustration at peasant groups and their stubborn opposition to farming innovations. Eventually, Tolstoy famously adopted peasant garb, practiced many kinds of peasant crafts and labor, and enthusiastically communicated with peasant and sectarian thinkers, admiring their simple Christian faith. His primers for peasant children and collections of teaching tales often picked up folktales, paring their style down to the extreme simplicity that he considered typical and preferable. Toward the end of his life Tolstoy sought out the opinions and experiences of Russian peasant laborers in works of passionately engaged journalism. Major figures in Russian revolutionary movements (Lenin, Plekhanov) admired his insights, letting his authority in depicting peasant life continue into the Soviet period.

The selection of literary, epigraphic, and papyrological sources presented in this chapter illustrates the key categories of courtier at the Roman imperial court, and the relationships of courtiers with each other and with the emperor. Categories of courtier include: the emperor’s friends (amici principis); his advisors; poets, writers, and other cultural figures; members of the imperial family; domestic workers; astrologers; the emperor’s sexual partners; and foreign royals. Various themes relating to the emperor’s relationships run through the sources, including: the tensions between ideals and realities; the competing claims of independence and subservience; the instability of court hierarchy; the operation of influence, brokerage, and patronage; the existence of power groups and factions at court; and the consequences of relationship breakdowns between emperors and courtiers.

Marital infidelity was not uncommon in the period covered in this book. Nor was it, for much of the time, a hidden or concealed crime. Newspapers regularly reported on bigamy, criminal conversation, divorce and desertion cases that came before the Irish courts and often involved adulterous behaviour. It is impossible to know how extensive extra-marital sexual behaviour was in any period. In this chapter we explore the attitudes expressed towards adulterous behaviour and couples who cohabited without marrying, how such behaviour reflected upon marital relationships and what it says more generally about sexuality in Irish society.Printed reports and newspaper accounts of trials for criminal conversation were an important medium through which the public became aware of adulterous affairs.This chapter reveals the level of non-conformity that existed in sexual matters amongst individuals and couples over a long time period.Sexual non-conformity can be viewed for instance, in cohabitation, adultery, the keeping of mistresses, and the advantage taken of women servants in households. By the end of the nineteenth century, both the Church and the law increasingly oversaw the implementation of sexual norms in society and perpetuated ideals for male and female sexual behaviour.

Chapter 7 analyses how groups present themselves at the peak of their developmental cycle through case study ANOC 28a, a subdivision of Simpson’s original ANOC group 28. This group shows how stelae can function both as objects to commemorate and strengthen family links, including the representation of household workers as essential group members, and as networking tools for colleagues seeking integration into a new space. The use of the term sn (‘collateral’) is quite complex here because it is applied to both relatives and colleagues, illustrating the intricacies of non-genealogical relatedness. The head of the group is crucial in this context as he is expected to take care of his subordinates who are, in turn, meant to be loyal to him. Sources often extol the virtues of the head of the group as a self-made man with excellent management and administrative skills, including the distribution of rations. These interactions exemplify the hierarchical nature of social relationships in ancient Egypt, which can be defined in the framework of asymmetric reciprocity. In this sense, the distinction between relatedness and patronage is not clear-cut, as they are both defined by similar practices in performative terms.

This chapter looks at the participation and representation of domestic servants in the suffrage movement. It seeks to account for their invisibility in much of the official propaganda and public spectacle of all the leading suffrage societies, while, at the same time, uncovering the hidden history of servants’ contribution to the fight for the vote. Class was a contentious issue within the suffrage movement. The various suffrage organisations argued over the basis upon which the franchise should be granted to women, since to ask for votes on the same terms as men was to accept the existing property qualification for male voters and exclude large numbers of working-class women. Historians have also debated the degree to which suffrage included or excluded working-class women. A focus on the role of domestic workers in the campaign for women’s enfranchisement offers a new perspective on these debates. It not only shines a light on the involvement of a different kind of working-class woman, but also raises questions about how the suffrage movement defined the ‘woman worker’.

Mistresses found the incessant round of searching for, hiring, training-up and getting used to a new servant, only for so many of them to move on after a short period of time, extremely irksome. Servants, on the other hand, endured poor wages, uncomfortable living and working conditions and unwarranted restriction of personal freedom. Were suffrage-supporting mistresses any better than the average employer? This chapter examines the ‘servant problem’ as it manifested in the homes of suffrage activists Mary and Emily Blathwayt of Bath, Helen Clark of Street and Mary Talbot Muirhead of London and Birmingham. Their feminism does seem to have encouraged a somewhat more progressive approach to servant keeping, and these mistresses sometimes shared suffrage sympathies and even occasionally forged friendships with their maids. Yet this did not prevent them from approaching the employment relationship as ultimately one of economic exchange. I therefore argue that attention to the personal, intimate and affective histories of domestic service should not obscure the significance of the wage relation with which they were always intertwined.

The right to professional employment, and the training and education that this necessitated, had been central demands of British feminism since the 1860s. Financial independence and the fulfilment of creative potential were counterposed to the enforced idleness and dependencies of the middle-class home. The association of emancipation with the public world of work retained a powerful hold over the feminist imagination into the twentieth century, and the suffrage movement often pointed to women’s labour as the basis for their claim to citizenship. This rhetoric of work was seen to unite the interests of middle-class professional women and their working-class sisters. There was much uncertainty, however, over whether domestic labour ought to be included in this vision of ennobling and liberating work. The desire to free women from the burden of housework was not simply about protecting them from overwork, or allowing them to do other work, but often was articulated as the right to do better work. This chapter examines two debates in the suffrage movement that posed this question particularly sharply: first, those surrounding the proposal for the endowment of motherhood; second, the controversy over the course in Home Science and Economics at Kings College for Women.

The chapter begins with some etymological discussions of the meaning of the words ‘household’, ‘home’ and ‘family’, and concentrates – but not to the exclusion of those social ranks below and above – on the urban bourgeoisie, from among whom Chaucer himself came, and from members of whom his audience was, probably, mostly drawn. It then goes on to consider servants and apprentices, as inevitable accompaniments of this rank, and also looks at the relations between husband and wife, including the roles of wives and widows, and the architecture of urban bourgeois homes. It concludes by looking at those above and below this rank, particularly the nobility, whose ‘great households’ have left considerable evidence of their organisation, but also includes the humbler households, about whom we can say comparatively little, because of the limitations of the evidence.

What is ‘heresy’? One answer would be, ‘that which orthodoxy condemns as such’; though we may also wish to consider when conscious dissent invites such a condemnation. The main ‘heresy’ in late medieval England was that usually termed Lollardy, understood to be inspired by the radical theological thought of John Wyclif (1328-1384), which among other things emphasised the overwhelmingly importance of Scripture, and of lay access to Scripture, through vernacular translation. Orthodox repression of heresy began in the late fourteenth century and developed in various ways in the fifteenth. There are small traces of these much wider battles in Chaucer’s oeuvre, but it would be very hard to say quite how he saw them. We might instead see the fluidity of attitude toward aspects of religion in Chaucer as a sign of his times. ‘Dissent’ can encompass more than that which is solidly decried as heresy, and ‘orthodoxy’ can turn out to be more than one mode of religious thought and expression.